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What you like is what you are
Wednesday 13th March 2013 | Suzanne
You might not think too much of it first, but new studies have shown that whatever you like on Facebook reveals more about you as a person than you could ever imagine. Not only can people assess what kind of person you are, but also your political standpoints, beliefs and even sexual behaviour and orientation. Every time you click that like button, you give away another clue to well-kept secrets.
Now you must be wondering how this is possible. Well, a group of researchers at the University of Cambridge, managed to determine a person’s race, IQ, personality, political views and even level of substance use just by studying their likes on Facebook. Now you might think that they studied obvious likes on the profiles to achieve this, such as men liking a ‘Boobs’ page on facebook or something. No, the team actually managed to figure this out by just looking at relatively unrelated and innocent likes, such as TV-shows, books, movies and music that was liked on a page. The researchers used models they developed, with a high accuracy rate. The male sexuality rate was predicted with 88 percent accuracy, race with 95 percent and political views with 85 percent.
This research has definitely been an eye opener to most, seeing how it showed how much the general Facebook user is actually willing to reveal about him/herself. You might think that this has no consequences whatsoever, but nothing could be less true. The information you reveal can always be used in a manipulative fashion be it either by people in your direct environment, or marketers. Obviously this information has a high relevance to the marketing industry. Customers can be easily examined and analysed and therefore exploited to the core.
Now you might be thinking that companies aren’t allowed to do this, which is technically right. They must reveal what information they gathered on their users and how, but do keep in mind that it is the consumer/user themself that is giving away the information, which makes it available for them to use. Clicking the like button might have some more weight now than it had before you started reading this article, but don’t worry too much. Just decide for yourself how much information you are willing to give away to the public. Something is telling me that if you are someone who is willing to like a ‘mylittlepony’ page as a 28 year-old man, you don’t really care about that kind of stuff too much anyway, but if not please try.
By Suzanne Alblas
